Among the most influential factors in our choice of a topic for each Argo site was the market assessment for the topic. When we asked the Argo stations to submit their initial proposals, we asked a number of questions about the opportunity they saw: Who does the subject affect? What are they reading today for coverage of related issues? How well-positioned is the station to develop the authoritative site on the topic?
The goals laid out for this project include filling gaps in the local journalism infrastructure, building significant online audience reach and engagement, and establishing each station as the authoritative source on an issue of local concern. As we worked with the stations to select and refine the final topic, we pursued a variety of methods to test each subject’s potential to meet these goals. Given the range of topics we considered, no two assessments were exactly the same. But here are five steps that were common to all of them.
1. Capturing the hunches.
In almost every case, each station identified potential topics using the sort of ambient awareness that any local institution develops over time. Some topics surfaced after a related story or series drew a strong response from the site’s community. Some had been popular beats at local news organizations until staff reductions snuffed them out. Others were just omnipresent (or soon-to-be-omnipresent) local stories that weren’t being authoritatively covered by any news source.
2. Quantifying the potential market.
The task of imagining how many people you could potentially reach with a topic is way more art than science. But it was one of the first things we asked several Argo stations to do as we explored ideas for topics.
If the topic concerns an industry, for example, there’s a good chance the site might interest folks who work in that industry. So our contacts at the stations dove into Census data, Federal labor statistics, trade publications and other materials to try to get a sense of how many people that included. Some subjects – such as health care spending – affect everybody. In those cases, we tried to determine who the primary seekers of information on the subject would be, and roughly how many of them there were.
Whenever I heard a numeric estimate of the size of a potential market, I’d pare it back in my head by 90 percent. If our site could attract 10 percent of the folks in that group every month, would that constitute a meaningful addition to the station’s reach? If not, could we adjust the focus of the topic to be relevant to a larger part of the station’s community?
In many cases, the number of people a topic touched wasn’t too narrow, but suspiciously broad. I was wary of topics that could “potentially appeal to everyone.” Our goal isn’t just to draw a crowd, but to establish the station’s mastery of a subject. Which led to the next part of the assessment…
3. Surveying the landscape.
Once we’d established a topic’s importance to a community, we needed to figure out how well it was covered. We scoured the output of local and national news orgs, industry groups and trade publications, and impassioned individuals online. We ran relevant keywords about the topic through Google – including its News Search and Blog Search engines – to find regular sources of information off the beaten path. We sifted through blogs on Technorati and groups on Facebook, and combed Twitter to find related hashtags, and individuals and organizations tweeting about related subjects.
Whenever we found a source, we looked for references to other sources. Blogrolls on blogs were invaluable pointers to good sites, for example, although the best sources are often linked to frequently in the blog itself. Twitter lists created by subject experts helped flesh out a network of important individuals to follow.
Several key questions animated our pursuit:
- How much is this topic getting covered today? We didn’t have any sort of threshold for what volume of coverage constituted saturation on a topic. But if every big development on a topic was independently covered by multiple sources, that gave us an indication that the landscape was pretty crowded.
- Where does coverage and conversation on this topic coalesce today? We were on the lookout for robust hubs that could be considered authoritative on the subject. When we found a site working to pull together information around a topic, we’d look for signs of life – timely content, comments and other community activity, enough traffic to appear on Quantcast’s radar. (See also: 10 free sites to estimate a blog’s popularity.) Sometimes we hit pay dirt, which prompted more questions about our focus. Would our site be different from existing ones in focus or ambition? Do we have the resources to do a better job?
- Does this niche have online niches of its own? Most of our topics encompassed a few different storylines – industries evolving, scientists exploring, politicians jousting, and in all cases, families and individuals adjusting. We scoured the Web for evidence that people in all these domains were leading intimate online conversations that we could tap into.
4. Examining the station’s reach.
Once we were satisfied that we’d hit on a worthy topic, we tried to figure out how well the station was situated to reach those the topic affects. Was it an extension of an existing beat or desk in the station’s newsroom, or would it represent a foray into brand new territory? Demographically, how much did the target community for the site overlap with the existing audience for the station?
What we found helped us sharpen our strategy further. If we were treading into uncharted territory for the station, our challenge was approaching the topic in a way that built on the station’s existing strengths. If, on the other hand, the station had already established some relevant authority, we needed to figure out how to expand the community the station had built.
5. Evaluating the network opportunity.
A final consideration for us was the topic’s place in the Argo universe. We wanted to cover a healthy range of issues, while maximizing the potential network effects wherever the topics overlapped. This meant we shied away from subjects that might be too parochial. Each of the sites would be pushing and pulling information to and from the NPR API, so we knew we’d be able to share information among the sites, NPR.org, and several of the station sites, at a minimum. So we were looking for topics with a strong local focus, but a rich national resonance. It was a good sign if we could imagine the blog sending the occasional story to NPR.org.